Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

How neoliberalism manufactured consent to secure its unlimited power

Part
10 – How Margaret Thatcher systematically destroyed the British
industry along with the trade unions

While
there were many elements out of which consent for a neoliberal turn
could be constructed, the Thatcher phenomenon would surely not have
arisen, let alone succeeded, if it had not been for the serious
crisis of capital accumulation during the 1970s. Stagflation was
hurting everyone. In 1975 inflation surged to 26 per cent and
unemployment topped one million. The nationalized industries were
draining resources from the Treasury.

This set
up a confrontation between the state and the unions. In 1972, and
then again in 1974, the British miners (a nationalized industry) went
on strike for the first time since 1926.

The
miners had always been in the forefront of British labour struggles.
Their wages were not keeping pace with accelerating inflation, and
the public sympathized. The Conservative government, in the midst of
power blackouts, declared a state of emergency, mandated a three-day
working week, and sought public backing against the miners. In 1974
it called an election seeking public support for its stand. It lost,
and the Labour government that returned to power settled the strike
on terms favourable to the miners.

The
victory was, however, pyrrhic. The Labour government could not afford
the terms of the settlement and its fiscal difficulties mounted. A
balance of payments crisis paralleled huge budget deficits. Turning
for credits to the IMF in 1975–6, it faced the choice of either
submitting to IMF-mandated budgetary restraint and austerity or
declaring bankruptcy and sacrificing the integrity of sterling, thus
mortally wounding financial interests in the City of London. It chose
the former path, and draconian budgetary cutbacks in welfare state
expenditures were implemented. The Labour government went
against the material interests of its traditional supporters. But
it still had no solution to the crises of accumulation and
stagflation. It sought, unsuccessfully, to mask the difficulties by
appealing to corporatist ideals, in which everyone was supposed to
sacrifice something for the benefit of the polity.

Its
supporters were in open revolt, and public sector workers initiated a
series of crippling strikes in the ‘winter of discontent’
of 1978. ‘Hospital workers went out, and medical care had to be
severely rationed. Striking gravediggers refused to bury the dead.
The truck drivers were on strike too. Only shop stewards had the
right to let trucks bearing “essential supplies” cross picket
lines. British Rail put out a terse notice “There are no trains
today” . . . striking unions seemed about to bring the whole nation
to a halt.’

The
mainstream press was in full cry against greedy and disruptive
unions, and public support fell away. The Labour government fell, and
in the election that followed Margaret Thatcher won a significant
majority with a clear mandate from her middle-class supporters to
tame public sector trade union power.

The
commonality between the US and the UK cases most obviously lies in
the fields of labour relations and the fight against inflation. With
respect to the latter, Thatcher made monetarism and strict budgetary
control the order of the day. High interest rates meant high
unemployment (averaging more than 10 per cent in 1979–84, and the
Trades Union Congress lost 17 per cent of its membership in five
years). The bargaining power of labour was weakened.

Alan
Budd, an economic adviser to Thatcher, later suggested that ‘the
1980s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and
public spending were a cover to bash the workers’.
Britain created what Marx called ‘an industrial reserve army’,
he went on to observe, the effect of which was to undermine the power
of labour and permit capitalists to make easy profits thereafter. And
in an action that paralleled Reagan’s provocation of PATCO in 1981,
Thatcher provoked a miners’ strike in 1984 by announcing a wave of
redundancies and pit closures (imported coal was cheaper).

The
strike lasted for almost a year, and, in spite of a great deal of
public sympathy and support, the miners lost. The back of a core
element of the British labour movement had been broken. Thatcher
further reduced union power by opening up the UK to foreign
competition and foreign investment. Foreign competition demolished
much of traditional British industry in the 1980s –– the steel
industry (Sheffield) and shipbuilding (Glasgow) more or less totally
disappeared within a few years, and with them a good deal of trade
union power.

Thatcher
effectively destroyed the indigenous nationalized UK automobile
industry, with its strong unions and militant labour traditions,
instead offering the UK as an offshore platform for Japanese
automobile companies seeking access to Europe. These built on
greenfield sites and recruited non-union workers who would submit to
Japanese-style labour relations.

The
overall effect was to transform the UK into a country of relatively
low wages and a largely compliant labour force (relative to the rest
of Europe) within ten years. By the time Thatcher left office,
strike activity had fallen to one-tenth of its former levels. She had
eradicated inflation, curbed union power, tamed the labour force, and
built middle-class consent for her policies in the process.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

globinfo
freexchange Frequently
- if not always - polls set-up by corporate media aim to track public
opinion on a specific issue. The results could be used by the deep
state apparatus in order to justify an action, or, figure out how to
handle a negative trend for the deep state agenda. Of
course, the question could be set-up in a very simplified and
convenient manner, so that the results could be translated
accordingly. Yet, the
results from the following MSNBC
poll on Julian Assange are so devastating for the
deep state planning that leave little room for any misconception and
manipulation. Specifically,
you have two options to answer the following question: “Should
Julian Assange be prosecuted for his involvement in WikiLeaks?” The
first option is to answer that "Yes, he is a criminal." The
second option is to answer that "No, he is a whistleblower
and deserves protection." At the
time we checked out the results, the second answer prevailed
overwhelmingly with 95% (~1…

by
system failure Donald
Trump and his bloodthirsty warhawks are about to break the record of
failed attempted coups against a single country. Concerning Latin
America, the US imperialists were setting the desirable conditions
for their corporate beasts usually by overthrowing governments and
supporting military dictatorships. But
Trump himself has already broken another record. The record of not
keeping his promises to the American people - every one of them. The
'anti-interventionist', 'anti-establishment' Trump, has already
started a war against Venezuela, which so far includes brutal
economic sanctions, sabotage operations, attempted coups. Trump not
only does whatever he can in order to satisfy the US
neocon/neoliberal establishment and the deep state, but especially in
the case of Venezuela, he follows the obsolete CIA playbook to the
letter. So,
after a series of failed orchestrated coups, Trump's warhawks
attempted to start a civil war in Venezuela by mobiliz…

globinfo freexchange
Former US Chief of Staff for Secretary of State, Lawrence Wilkerson, spoke with Sharmini Peries of the Real News about Trump's plans for a potential US military action against Venezuela.

As he pointed out:
Elliott Abrams, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and the administration’s approach to Venezuela, is as if they were Panama or they were Honduras. They are not. They’re very professional. That puts them above Argentina, above Chile, whose militaries are quite competent, too.
Mr. Trump ought to be very, very careful about saying he’s going to send marines or soldiers to Venezuela because the Venezuelan military will be unified immediately. It will take to the hills and it will fight as the Vietnamese did during the Vietnam War, and as the Taliban are in Afghanistan right now: to the last marine, to the last soldier.
Putin is a smart man, probably told Trump 'you don’t want to get involved in those jungles. You don’t want to get involved in those mountains. You …

globinfo
freexchange Plenty
of propaganda is manufactured by the US deep state apparatus to push
for the imperialist agenda. Yet, some elements of the propaganda
machine are still unable to realize that independent truth seekers
and real journalists are watching, and therefore, these elements
could be easily exposed. Sloppy
efforts immediately backfire in social media and the Internet. Most
recent sloppy efforts are related to Gaza and Venezuela. As the
Newsweekreported: Senior
2020 Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson used a 2015 video
showing a Ukrainian rocket launch alongside comments about this
weekend's deadly attacks between Israel and Gaza militants and a
condemnation of congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Pierson,
who was Donald Trump's 2016 campaign spokesperson and is a
frequent cable news guest, shared the video—which was first
posted online in 2015 and reportedly shows Ukraine launching
dozens of rockets at Russian-backed separatists—on Sunday. Alongsi…

globinfo freexchange
Outside of an Alexandria, Virginia courtroom, Chelsea Manning explained to reporters why she would refuse to testify before a second grand jury investigating Wikileaks' Julian Assange, and as a result, face jail time once again. On May 9, Manning was released from jail because the term of the last grand jury she refused to testify before expired. She was immediately subpoenaed once again—for May 16.
Her following words clearly depict that Chelsea Manning is a person with strong and solid principles and a real hero: I will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury, so it doesn’t matter what it is, or what the case is. I’m just not going to comply or cooperate. Facing jail again, potentially today, doesn’t change my stance. The prosecutors are deliberately placing me in an impossible position: go to jail and face the prospect of being held in contempt again, or, in the alternative, foregoing my principles, the strong positions that I have, that I hold dear…

...
and the liberal centrists must be really pissed offglobinfo
freexchange It was
epic indeed. The moment where the crowd inside the Fox ultra-right
nest enthusiastically cheers in favor of a government-run healthcare
system, could actually be considered a historical moment, thanks to
Bernie Sanders. The
moment clearly depicts and officially marks the end of controlled
audiences in controlled MSM environments. It shows that the well-paid
MSM pundits and their producers are finding increasingly difficult to
set up the scene according to the desirable agenda. Therefore,
audience reactions can't be directed, or predicted in many cases by
the MSM 'experts'. The
shock for the MSM tools was inevitable. It shows that they are now
completely detached from the ordinary people and their problems. But the
whole thing highlighted something even more fundamental. It was another
loud evidence for the fact that the BS neoliberal narratives don't
work anymore. And even
more remarkably, th…

As we wrote recently, the moment where the crowd inside the Fox ultra-right nest enthusiastically cheers in favor of a government-run healthcare system, could actually be considered a historical moment, thanks to Bernie Sanders.

The moment clearly depicts and officially marks the end of controlled audiences in controlled MSM environments. It shows that the well-paid MSM pundits and their producers are finding increasingly difficult to set up the scene according to the desirable agenda. Therefore, audience reactions can't be directed, or predicted in many cases by the MSM 'experts'.
Now, here is an example showing a successful set up through a controlled audience. It took place inside CNN and there is plenty of evidence that was indeed carefully set up. In the following video, Mike Figueredo of the Humanist Report felt optimistic, but also quite frustrated at the same time. Figueredo's reaction …

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has begun responding to queries by the press about a leaked document which contradicts official OPCW findings on an alleged chemical weapons attack last year in Douma, Syria. The prepared statement they’ve been using in response to these queries confirms the authenticity of the document.
To recap, a few days ago the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media (WGSPM) published a document signed by a man named Ian Henderson, whose name is seen listed in expert leadership positions on OPCW documents from as far back as 1998 and as recently as 2018. It’s unknown who leaked the document and what other media organizations they may have tried to send it to. The report picks apart the extremely shaky physics and narratives of the official OPCW analysis on the gas cylinders allegedly dropped from Syrian government aircraft in the Douma attack, and concludes that “The dimensions, characteristics and appearance of the cylinders, a…

In this episode of RT's Going Underground, former MP and author of A Very British Coup and The Friends of Harry Perkins, Chris Mullin, spoke about the history of MI5 and MI6 meddling in UK politics against Labour Party leaders. He also estimated whether a British coup is underway against Jeremy Corbyn.
The story of A Very British Coup was set in the 1980s when there was speculation about the possibility of a government led by someone like Tony Benn and the establishment conspired to bring it down. The establishment in this case being a sort of mixture of the security and intelligence services, the media barons, with a little help from the Americans.
Tony Benn looked likely to become deputy leader of the Labour Party which at the time was strongly challenging the government of Margaret Thatcher in the opinion polls. Persistent rumours circulated over the years about attempts by members of the British security services, and other wings of the British Establish…

With
Juan Guaidó’s parallel government attempting to take power with
the backing of the U.S., it is telling that the top political donors
of those in the U.S. most fervently pushing regime change in
Venezuela have close ties to Monsanto and major financial stakes in
Bayer.by
Whitney Webb Part
4 - Why is a top to Marco Rubio increasing his stake in Bayer while
others flee? Yet, it
is AEI’s top individual donor noted in the accidental “schedule
of contributors” disclosure who is most telling about the private
biotech interests guiding the Trump administration’s Venezuela
policy. Paul Singer, the controversial billionaire hedge fund
manager, has long been a major donor to neoconservative and Zionist
causes — helping fund the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), the
successor to the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); and the
neoconservative and islamophobic Foundation for the Defense of
Democracies (FDD), in addition to the AEI. Singer
is notably one of the top political donors to Senat…